Various mining vehicles, such as rock drilling equipment, loading equipment and transport equipment, are used in a mine. Mining vehicles may be manned or unmanned. Unmanned mining vehicles may be remote-controlled by an operator from a control station, for instance, and they may be equipped with measuring instruments suitable for location determination. Unmanned mining vehicles may be operated automatically, e.g. driven along a desired route in the mine, as long as the location of the device can be determined. The automated operation may be carried out in a surface or underground operating area.
An automatically operated mining vehicle may encounter an unexpected condition, which may necessarily not be tackled by the automated settings of the mining vehicle. Examples of such unexpected conditions may comprise locations in a hole being drilled comprising water or a fracture and locations where the properties of the rock material suddenly change. Such unexpected conditions may also relate to obstacles hindering the mining vehicle from moving in a desired direction. Typically, when an automatically operated mining vehicle encounters such unexpected condition, the automated operation is interrupted, the mining vehicle is stopped and possibly the operator at the remote control station is notified by an alarm. The operator may then take over the mining vehicle to remote manual operation and solve the problem causing the interruption of the automated operation by operating the mining vehicle manually over the unexpected condition.
However, taking over the mining vehicle to remote manual operation requires further operations of shutting down the automated operation mode and establishing a remote control channel to the mining vehicle in order to operate the mining vehicle manually. On the other hand, taking over the mining vehicle to remote manual operation mode during the automated operation mode causes the mining vehicle to stop its operation immediately. Any such interruptions reduce the efficiency of the mining operations. Partly for this reason, operators at the remote control station tend to allow the automated operation mode to continue until an unexpected condition is encountered, thereby possibly causing the mining vehicle to stop. However, the automated operation mode may have caused the mining vehicle to end up to a very difficult situation, and solving the problem caused thereby manually may take a long time.